Among the speakers were national MAS leaders Esam Omeish and Mahdi Bray, respectively the MAS president and head of their Virginia Commission on Immigration just weeks after his appointment. According to a September 28, 2007 article in the Washington Post, Omeish was forced out when a video surfaced of Omeish preaching holy war against Israel at a December 22, 2000, Jerusalem Day rally in Washington D.C., where he said:

...you have learned the way, that you have known that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land...and we shall do everything we can to help your cause.

On May 15, 2004, Bray also bestowed terrorist leader Abdurahman Alamoudi with a MAS Freedom Foundation award in abstentia as he was awaiting trial on terrorism charges (which he would later be convicted of and sentenced to 20 years in prison). Bray called him an “outstanding American Muslim who has courageously stood in defense of freedom and justice,” and vowed, “I don't care what they say, we're gonna continue to work with him, and the other detainees, Abdelrahim, and we are gonna continue to fight back. Let our people go! Let our people go!”

Bray’s enthusiasm for Abdurahman Alamoudi goes back many years, in fact. At an October 2000 rally in Lafayette Park across from the White House, Bray can be seen standing beside Alamoudi enthusiastically cheering his friend and compatriot (who again is currently serving 20 years in prison on terrorism charges), as he cheers the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations.

As can be expected, the local dead-tree media showed up at the MAS conference and wrote a glowing report, “Muslims’ roots in America branch out,” describing MAS as “a charitable, religious, social, cultural, and educational nonprofit organization.” No mention was made by the Toledo Blade of the recent controversies surrounding Omeish or Bray, or the terrorist connections and Muslim Brotherhood origins of the MAS, which were covered in an extensive investigation of the organization by the Chicago Tribune in 2004. They also could have consulted the meticulously documented MAS dossier prepared by the Investigative Project on Terrorism to provide at least a thin measure of background on the group to their readers.

Had the Toledo Blade bothered to conduct actual research, they also would have discovered that the organization of yet another speaker at the MAS Toledo conference, Dawud Walid, state director for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Michigan affiliate, had been named as unindicted co-conspirator this past summer in a federal terror financing trial. During that same trial, the DOJ entered into evidence and FBI agent Lara Burns testified concerning documentation proving that MAS had been founded and controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But in the event that the dead-tree media had asked too many questions, or stumbled accidentally upon any one of these scandalous background and activities of Esam Omeish, Mahdi Bray, or the MAS itself, no doubt Mahdi Bray would have been sent forth to attack the paper and the reporter as “Islamophobic,” and steadfastly deny even the most readily provable claims.

Such was the case following a Dallas Morning News article by terrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross following the 7/7 London suicide bombings, who noted that MAS had published in their March 2002 edition of their American Muslim magazine a fatwa authorizing suicide bombings, and that their membership study curriculum features a number of Muslim Brotherhood works and well-known jihadist tracts advocating for terrorism and violence.

Mahdi Bray responded by denying both charges, essentially accusing Gartenstein-Ross of lying, as expressed in a follow-up editorial in the same paper. He categorically denied the claims about the suicide bombing fatwa:

Additionally, Mr. Ross asserts that a fatwa (religious opinion) in our March 2002 American Muslim magazine supports suicide bombing. There is absolutely no such fatwa in the March 2002 edition of the American Muslim magazine.

As I pointed out in an article last May here at FrontPage Magazine, “Cover-up and Deny,” while MAS had removed the fatwa in question from the magazine’s website (which read exactly how Gartenstein-Ross represented), the fatwa could still be found in various Internet archive sites not controlled by MAS. Bray's public denial was intentionally fabricated to conceal his organization's institutional extremism.

In response to the terrorist-inciting jihadist tracts in the MAS membership curriculum, MAS responded by having all of their chapters remove the curriculum from their respective websites in a deliberate effort to conceal from the public their radical agenda. Once again, unfortunately, MAS could not remove the evidence from the Internet archive, which contains a copy of the curriculum as printed in the April 2001 edition of MAS’s American Muslim magazine. The entire MAS membership reading list can be found in the second-part of my response to Bray’s false denials, “Cover-Up and Deny, Part 2.”

The story of the MAS conference in Toledo earlier this month is a tale of an organization that readily demonstrates its extremist roots when it believes no one is looking, and its officials, who are prepared to flagrantly lie to conceal the true nature of their covert agenda. The plans for the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in North America were also revealed this past summer when a document was made public outlining their goals to wage a “grand jihad” to undermine our systems and values to replace them with a strict fundamentalist version of Islam. The document outlines the true agenda of the MAS and its allied organizations:

The Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood's name for itself] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions.

The people of Toledo, however, cannot afford to ignore what’s at work in their community, especially in light of Mahdi Bray’s appearance in town just a few months ago. With three Toledo area residents already facing terrorism charges, can the citizens of the GlassCity afford to remain ignorant about the Muslim American Society, Esam Omeish, Mahdi Bray, and their intent to wage their “grand jihad” in northwestern Ohio? As evidenced by the recent MAS conference, the grand jihad may already be well underway.

Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to Frontpagemag.com and an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.

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